№ 01 · December 2025
On everyone becoming a DJ
I noticed something recently that I'm just not quite sure about. The trend that everyone is becoming a DJ. I see a lot more promise in this idea as someone who has also spent a lot of time picking out songs. So let's explore this.
What does it mean to be a DJ in 2025. No, not the type of DJ we are used to like David Guetta or some of the major festival DJs, I mean the YouTube channels that show people playing a collection of songs. I have found myself listening to those more recently. Maybe it is a new crop of people who love it so much that they want to share their art? Why do I say love, I mean, it is the mere fact that I learned recently that these DJs don't earn money as they do not own the rights to the songs. So with no monetary incentive immediately clear we must assume the main driver is not wealth.
I bought a DJ set to explore the phenomenon, and when I consider why I did, it wasn't because I wanted to suddenly make money. Instead, like most humans, I bought it for social status. "If my friends can see how much good taste I have then I will get some sort of admiration." Like most status games, typing that out makes me feel icky and also makes it seem super misaligned. Can we assume most of the DJs on tiktok and instagram are doing this for the same reason? Status? Let's explore that further.
DJs are the next artists. This is a bold statement given that both have existed for years; we cannot suddenly expect one to eat the other. It's not a consumption, rather, a convergence. As skills exist in nature, the expectation is that they become more and more complex and continue to expand to further stratify those who partake in them. It must be a law of physics or game theory. I am yet to find a skill that has such a local maxima where there is no stratification. Even something as simple as walking has levels. As a fun exercise, record yourself walking and watch that side by side with someone say Tom Cruise or any other model on the runway. Nature loves power laws. Applied to artists and DJs, there continues to be a blurring of the roles. An oversupply of DJs means the now DJs must bring something new to the table beyond taste, most needing to invest in beautiful aesthetics, appeal to specific niches or flat out perform and make remixes. A similar phenomenon can be observed in VC and PE convergence with VCs now investing in fullstack companies that are AI enabled given the upside starts to look more attractive than conventional SaaS products. The outlier becomes the norm.
This stratification may actually further the idea of everyone becoming a DJ. I noticed a trend in software where practitioners love software that simplifies hard parts of the trade. "Information wants to be free, it also wants to be expensive." The biggest paradox of a statement I have heard. When tools reduce the barrier for entry of a skill, it unlocks access to a new crop of people. Some of the new become experts while a lot of the old fade to obscurity. This happens over time until we reach equilibrium and access is further expanded.
Ok, so why now? DJs and artists have existed for a long time, so why would everyone suddenly become a DJ? Physics. When supply grows exponentially (music) and demand stays fixed (attention) then we need a filter function to route the music to the right audience. We call these the "gatekeepers". Gatekeepers have existed for long in the music industry and this isn't a new concept. In fact, DJs have been the gatekeepers once in the past. More on that later. Gatekeepers have been radio stations, music video channels, and most recently, algorithms.
Hmm but who is to say DJs will be the next gatekeepers? Why wouldn't the algorithms just get better? What's the actual shift here. For a while I have struggled with this answer. To be honest, it has mostly been a gut thing about everyone becoming DJs but I haven't actually tried to explore it fully. Follow me on this journey:
It is December of 2025 (or any year really), the new Spotify wrapped just got released. Everyone is obsessed with sharing their songs and stats. People want to be recognized for their taste. Ok, but steel manning the opposition here: this only matters because of the scarcity right? If Spotify wrapped were monthly then consumers wouldn't post their stats because the lost scarcity takes away from the aura. This is a valid critique, but is in fact not disproving the fact that people want to be acknowledged for their taste. It just shows me that the existing tools don't do a great job of allowing users share their taste. I mean in cross domain examples, we have strong evidence of these desires for niches like booktok influencers, fragrance influencers, etc so why not music? I did a quick search on tiktok for music discovery influencers and honestly the results were disappointing. It is a whole market that doesn't exist. Which then makes me wonder… is the algorithm still the main gatekeeper and is DJ just a hobby as it has already been.
I would love to imagine a world where artists and curators/DJs are able to form relationships and we have almost a peer to peer discovery mechanism for music for micro niche and more abundance rather than the algorithm. This would be a healthy ecosystem and can grow the DJs to just anyone who has good taste the same way Spotify started with pirates and expanded to everyone and their mom. This sort of taste based routing will be a healthy market. People don't want to have to pick what they listen to, they love to be told what to listen to. Here is where curators will do the hard work. See, music has a horrible discovery problem compared to other media because you can process algorithms for images quickly in the brain and see if we are interested or not, videos have the same luxury by extension. Music on the other hand has no quick palpable way of knowing what it will sound like, so consumers tend to stay within the comfort zone that they have already established. The major platforms want retention so they feed to this cycle. If a curator's "job" were to do the work of parsing through the noise for followers, then discovery of artists will become leveled and consumer satisfaction will go up. Why isn't anyone working on this??? Subtly from observing myself, I actually treat artists as pseudo curators. If I see a list of unknown songs and artists, I will pick artists I know and expect the song to be good because I trust that they are good at making music and I know what sound to expect. Artists and DJs are converging, just DJs don't make any money so they are fuckd. If there were a way to monetize taste then this ecosystem becomes a no-brainer.